Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, June 25, 2009

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values. (ugh!)

- Chief Justice Warren Burger, who died on this day, 1995



Warren Burger supported Roe vs. Wade. I am glad he did, for theological reasons. In the past, that decision made me think well of him, from a moral point of view. Having read of various other decisions and having read many of his other statements, I consider him to have been an example of moral, as well as judicial, cowardliness, but for this one decision.

I am using this opportunity to make a case theologically for solving the “problem” of abortion. In my opinion, it will only be solved by following the teachings – as shown in His behaviour – of Jesus.

Women must be equal. Period.

This as we see, is extremely difficult in what is essentially a continuing patriarchal society ….. which America still is, in spades. Let me make this clear: opposition to abortion is a patriarchal tool in the determined effort to keep women as second or tenth class citizens. Opposition to abortion is a tool of male dominance, and of the enslavement of women.

No: I am not fundamentally “in favour” of abortion. But I am in favour of the equality of women. Women are not breeding cattle. They are not subjects to a male (or cultural) philosophy that relegates women to the stature of slaves to their child-bearing role. Nor should they be victims to the sex drives of the male animal, or victims as single-parent families, struggling desperately to survive when abandoned by menfolk, who are often abetted by a patriarchal court system.

It is shameful I believe, and an affront to “God” and to Jesus, to demean the equality of women as human beings, based on some patriarchal and later interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures by men.

The horror and pain of abortion is a searing condemnation of our Christian and cultural determination to demean women, to deny them their equality as human beings.

Do we want to eliminate abortion? It can be done in a pen-stroke. Establish the equality of women. Then no woman need have a child she does not want or cannot care for, need not have a child foisted on her by a dominating male, need not ever be treated by a sexual partner as a subject being.

Then, no child will be born unwanted, or as a product of male dominance. No woman carrying a child to term will be afflicted in poverty or in psychological oppression and a form of slavery.

Women must be equal. I believe that this is what “God” intended. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Brian+